Ben-lie-zi – The Latest ‘Smoking Gun’ Wasn’t Even There

Last Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview with a “key witness” of the Benghazi attacks turned out to be, shall we say, a little less than reliable. Dylan Davies, who was interviewed on the air under the pseudonym, Morgan Jones, was no where near the compound on the night of the attack.

In the interview, Davies described racing to the Benghazi compound once the attacks started. He claimed to scale a 12-foot wall and he fended off an extremist with the butt of a rifle. Unfortunately, none of that happened.

In Davies’s 21 / 2-page incident report to Blue Mountain, the Britain-based contractor hired by the State Department to handle perimeter security at the compound, he wrote that he spent most of that night at his Benghazi beach-side villa. Although he attempted to get to the compound, he wrote in the report, “we could not get anywhere near . . . as roadblocks had been set up.”

He learned of Stevens’s death, Davies wrote, when a Libyan colleague who had been at the hospital came to the villa to show him a cellphone picture of the ambassador’s blackened corpse. Davies wrote that he visited the still-smoking compound the next day to view and photograph the destruction.

After hearing the 60 Minutes report, the right-wing went nuts. Lindsey Graham threatened to block all nominations. Right-wing blogs and Fox News thought they had the smoking gun. You almost had to step over the puddles of anti-Obama opportunistic drool.

Of course, Davies’ self-portrayal as a superhero wasn’t the only part of the 60 Minutes interview. He did complain of poor communication and the now well-known fact that there were warning signs before the attacks. In other words, there really is nothing to see here.

Media Matters isn’t letting the issue go, as well they shouldn’t. David Brock has penned a letter to CBS asking for a retraction, but after witnessing their extremely one-sided reporting on the Affordable Care Act, one has to wonder if they are trying to outFox Fox News these days. In fact, Fox was even more balanced in their coverage. Bizarro world.